A lot of the marketing material we put out here at MarkLogic talks about the improved agility we enable for our customers – decreasing their time to value and time to market for new products, as well as making it easier for them to adjust to changes in their business requirements. But, anyone can say anything, right? The trick is proving it.

Well, we have. Again.

A 6X Improvement in Time to Value

Earlier this year, MarkLogic was asked to participate in a “proof of concept” (POC) with a Fortune 500 insurance company. As part of its IT modernization efforts, the company had been working to build new systems of record –for customers, agents, and policies – and was struggling to deliver the applications using existing legacy relational database platforms. So, it decided to test out MarkLogic – head-to-head against the familiar SQL-based technology – to see if we could do any better.

We’ve put the overall results in an infographic – but here are some key facts and figures:

In three weeks’ time the POC team, using MarkLogic, delivered across 67 proof points and 5 “extra credit” items, loading in both current data and historical data and building data services on top of the database.

The POC team spent 300 hours delivering on those proof points and extra items ─ while the SQL team spent 1,700 hours and never even got the data loaded.

And, in case you’re wondering, the POC team was composed of people at the insurance company who had never used MarkLogic before. Yes, MarkLogic provided advice – but it was the company’s own IT team that achieved these results.

Why such a massive difference in performance?

The schema changed four times during the course of the POC. This was a trivial thing for the POC team, but threw a wrench into the SQL team’s progress. Updates took about two hours each with MarkLogic, but 20 hours each with the relational database platform.

With minimal upfront work required to create the initial database and load data, the POC team could start developing the application faster. This leaves more time to iterate on the application so that it truly meets user requirements.

Universal index and APIs

Any application is based on database queries. The POC team was able to create the right queries quickly thanks to MarkLogic’s “ask anything” universal index and numerous APIs.

As a result – no surprise – the company has decided to move forward with an organization-wide initiative based on MarkLogic.

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